Thanks to I Design Your Logo for coming up with a new logo for me. Disclosure: they did it for free for me, but I needed a new one and thought “why not?” They sent me a bunch of ideas, I picked a couple I liked, and they iterated again. So far most people on Twitter and Google Buzz like it.

At the same time, I have a new design, put in place by my boss, Rob La Gesse. He bought me a new theme for Wordpress and put in place new Twitter widgets from Publitweet (nicer than the ones from Twitter themselves) and also put in place the Wibiya bar at the bottom which lets you see a variety of things I’ve done around the Internet (Google Buzz coming soon) and also adds those Facebook like buttons.

One of the things I’ve tried to do is keep my blog simple and easy to read. That’s one reason we went with the Genesis Wordpress theme.

Anyway, hope you like it, although, like I said over on Google Buzz most of my readers probably won’t even notice because they can read me over there or on an RSS aggregator.

This post reposted from building43.

Last week Rocky Barbanica and I visited Israel and we videoed many companies (some of those interviews are still to come after we edit them). But while going through all the videos, I wondered what Silicon Valley could learn from these companies? After all, Silicon Valley is undergoing another major transformation. One from a place that makes Silicon chips to one that makes Social Networks (Google Buzz, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook are all headquartered within 45 miles of Silicon Valley, all grown in the past few years while Intel turned off its last fab here).

Why should Silicon Valley look to Israel for good ideas? Well, because, simply, this small country has more than its fair share of great ideas, especially when it comes to social networks.

1. 6Rounds — what happens when you mate Chatroulette (which has 20 million unique visitors a month) with Zynga (popular casual game producer)? 6Rounds. Look to companies like these to find new ways to addict millions of people to both video and gaming. Watch the video with 6Rounds’ founders.

2. Waze — shows that a small company can kick Google’s ass at mapping, but only if they get enough users. This company uses crowds to bring better data onto maps than anyone else. We drive around Tel Aviv to get a look, but Silicon Valley would do well to learn what has made Waze popular around the world and, what, could even disrupt Google Maps on its home turf. Watch the video with Waze’s head of business development.

3. iStreamer — Silicon Valley is hot about the iPad, many of the best apps are out of the valley, but iStreamer shows that interesting new UIs and approaches can come along from elsewhere. Watch the video of the founders of iStreamer give me the first look.

4. Genieo and My6sense — these two companies are trying to solve the information overload problem by picking out only the best news from your streams to show you. What can Silicon Valley learn from these two companies? Well, Google Buzz has no filtering yet and it needs it. Facebook has filtering, but it could be better. These two companies have different approaches to reduce noise and get news that interests you. Watch the video with Genieo’s CEO. Watch a video from My6sense about My6sense.

5. Supersonic Ads — virtual currency is very popular in Europe and Supersonic Ads is showing us how to incorporate virtual currency into our applications so our developers can get paid. Watch the video with Supersonic Ads’ co-founder.

6. Springo — what Yahoo started about 15 years ago is continued by Springo, which is a new kind of directory and search engine for the new social world. Shows visually the most popular websites too, which makes the web more useful than Google or Yahoo is for many searches, like Jobs. Watch the video with Springo’s CEO.

7. Interlude.fm — could rejuvenate MySpace, or offer a new video entertainment platform a new way to get audience. Watch the video of famous Israeli singing star introducing Interlude.fm at the Techonomy Conference in Tel Aviv (he won for best new company there). Then watch my own interview after the conference with Yoni.

8. Fiddme — shows what happens when you hook up a great mobile app with Foursquare. Why hasn’t Yelp or Google’s mobile apps done this yet? Oh, yeah, protect their business interests. Silicon Valley would do well to learn the story telling skills of founder Yosi Taguri, too. Watch the video presentation by Fiddme’s founder at the Techonomy conference in Tel Aviv, thanks to NewsGeek for filming that.

9. Omek Interactive — this company has a cool new gaming system that will compete with Microsoft’s Xbox Natal, which will come later this year. But this company shows that you can develop great new user experiences and we don’t have to wait for big companies to do it. Watch the video with Omek’s CEO here.

10. Soluto — this company is going to announce soon. What can Silicon Valley learn from it? Well, for one, they aim to show there’s still a great business in helping Microsoft Windows users improve their computers. Unfortunately I can’t say more until after they launch. Video coming soon to building43.

11. Mainsoft — they integrate Sharepoint and Outlook with Google Docs, what does this teach Silicon Valley? That a pure Web play might not be the best way to go, most users dont want to jump completely into the new world and want to stick with what has worked for them for 10 years or more, so this company is looking to bridge Google Docs into Lotus, Microsoft, and Rational environments. Video coming soon to building43.

12. Hacktics — these guys are helping developers make their code safer from attacks with a new product called Seeker (Techcrunch just wrote about them). This is still something Silicon Valley needs to improve. Even Facebook and Twitter, this week, had some attacks from hackers that showed weaknesses in coding. Video coming soon to building43.

13. Pageonce — this company shows how you can morph yourself from one business (helping travelers) to another (helping bill payers). Lots of Silicon Valley companies need to shift directions faster and Pageonce shows how to do it successfully. But Pageonce is also showing how to be a successful mobile app developer, and has raised $10 million in capital to do just that. Watch the video with Pageonce’s head of engineering.

14. Conduit — professional publishers are always looking for ways to get more engagement from their readers and Conduit’s browser apps show us how to do that. Techcrunch even uses them to help their readers. Watch the video with Conduit.

15. Starling.tv — this isn’t an Israeli company, but I met them in Kinneret, Israel, at Yossi Vardi’s camp. Lots of people see them as the pioneers in a new social TV field. Already Twitter and Facebook are highly integrated with TV — during the Oscars, for instance, thousands of users were discussing that TV show in live time. Starling is hoping to make a social experience that focuses only on TV and could, in the process, show Silicon Valley how to make tons of money off of TV. Watch the video with Starling’s founder.

Jeff Jarvis wraps up a couple of weeks of bloggers’ angst about Facebook in a post titled “Confusing *a* public with *the* public.”

Some things.

1. I +love+ the Facebook like button. More on that in a minute.
2. So far only about 50 of my more than 1,300 friends have disappeared from my Facebook friend network. Hardly an indictment by the tech elite (and some of those probably haven’t deleted their accounts, but just removed me as a friend, something that’s pretty common and has been seen every year — keep in mind that’s since last August, so I don’t even think I’ve lost 50 friends in past month).
3. There’s a competitive social network, Pip.io, which answers all of Jeff’s concerns (has much better thought out model of privacy and publics) but so far it hasn’t seen any major adoption.
4. Isn’t this the fifth time Facebook has pissed off pundits? What happened the previous four times it pissed off people? Oh, yeah, it saw huge growth.
5. When I was in Tel Aviv Facebook’s like buttons were so popular people were wearing them as fashion statements and at the biggest tech conference there, Marker.Comvention, they were handing out Facebook like buttons as stickers.

But over the past few weeks I’ve talked with lots of people about Facebook and my attitude toward privacy. It’s clear that Facebook has messed with something and that some of us are having a tough time with that. I think Jeff nailed what it was.

Instead of calling it “publics” I say we wanted to be in control of our story. I said that Facebook had brought us an inch closer to the end of privacy.

The thing is, my wife says she doesn’t care. My wife is closer to a normal user than I ever will be. I haven’t cared about privacy for years. If I don’t want you to read something I don’t put it on a computer. Period.

Remember, I worked at Microsoft. What happened in 2000? The DOJ took all of Microsoft employees’ supposedly private emails and put them into public. So I knew back then that anything I put on a computer could end up on the front page of the New York Times.

This is why I took a very transparent attitude for the past decade toward my life. I have always set my Facebook to the most public setting possible.

Whoa?!? Here’s the deal: I wish Facebook had NO PRIVACY AT ALL!

That’s called the open web. I wish Google could index every word I write on Facebook. Hint, it can’t.

The thing I hate about Facebook is that people who want to see my profile can’t. Even now only 5,000 of you can look at my Facebook profile. That’s lame.

I want to live my life in public. Why? Because that way none of you can exploit me more than any other.

Right now 1,300 people have access to my Facebook profile. That sucks.

I wish you all had access to my profile.

Yes, I know some of you have delusions of creating the equivalent of an exclusive dinner party, or, even, something bigger like a TED conference in your Facebook page.

I’m just so bored with all that talk. Just what are you doing that needs to be so damned private? Are you having sex inside Facebook? Doing illegal drugs? Cheating on your wife? Damn, your Facebook life must be SO interesting!

Me, count me out of this whole privacy thing. I want everything I do to be public and then I don’t have to spill thousands of words crying when Mark Zuckerberg takes my stuff and exposes it in a search engine.

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk about why I love Facebook’s new features so much.

1. I’m finding new restaurants, thanks to Yelp’s use of Facebook’s likes.
2. I’m finding new hockey players to follow thanks to NHL’s use of Facebook’s likes.
3. I’m finding new questions and answers thanks to Answer.com’s use of Facebook’s likes. (That’s the #18th biggest site on the web, and they just turned on likes).
4. I’m finding new music over on Pandora thanks to its sharing of my Facebook’s friend’s music listening behaviors.

So, cry me a river. Your “publics” have been destroyed. Your privacy is gone.

Come join us in the open web Facebook! Get rid of all the walls, including the stupid limits of 5,000 friends and the stupid kicking people off of the service (which continues to this day).

I applaud that Zuckerberg is trying to be less like AOL and more like the open web.

Now excuse me, I’m off to click “like” on some more things and, even, have added a new bar from Wibiya where you can see other people who have clicked like on my blog. Oh, yet another cool feature thanks to Zuckerberg’s throwing our publics under the bus.

Thank you Mark!

Dave Winer wrote an interesting piece about Twitter and Facebook and the relative hype of their press conferences.

He says I will get all breathless about Google in a couple of weeks when they have their product announcements, the same way I got breathless about Facebook.

Sorry, I doubt it. Google has squandered its vision over the last few product announcements. Google Wave? Google Buzz? Google Phone? Please. Fool me three times, I’m an idiot, OK. But I won’t fall for the fourth.

But Dave is right. Ignore the first week’s worth of coverage of ANYTHING. The truth actually shows itself after that. My old boss at Microsoft, Jeff Sandquist, used to write about whether he kept using something cool after a week.

So, let’s look at the press events of the past month:

Apple iPad release. Started a little slow, but now the geeks in Israel, are showing me their iPad apps and are excited. Everyone wants to touch the iPad and even the cynics want one. In other words, the product stood up to the hype.

Twitter news announcements. They showed off several things: new monetization model called Promoted Tweets. New metadata API called Annotations. New @anywhere. Now, has anyone this weekend in Israel talked to me about any of this stuff? No. In fact, the developers I’m hanging out with, when pushed to talk about Twitter, visibly yawn. Where did Twitter go wrong? First, Ev Williams didn’t announce the news. He let his employees announce the news after his keynote. And worse they didn’t ship the coolest feature, annotations, and still haven’t. Twitter’s @anywhere platform hasn’t gotten that much pickup, at least not when compared with Facebook like buttons, and developers I’ve talked to who have tried implementing it say it doesn’t do that much that’s interesting. In other words, Twitter didn’t announce much interesting news and didn’t ship the most interesting stuff and haven’t caught developer’s attention.

Facebook news announcements. When Zuckerberg was on stage he announced several big announcements, ones that we are continuing to talk about. New like buttons. Turning off the 24-hour limit on keeping data on your own systems. Sharing of data so that apps like Pandora can now show what your friends are talking about. Etc etc. These are huge announcements, much bigger than anything Twitter announced on their face, but even better they not only turned on all the features that morning but had tons of interesting customers who had already implemented them. I interviewed the NHL’s geeks who had already added these buttons. I interviewed Pandora’s CTO who had already added social features to his app. Other people had Levis to talk with, among other major companies. I just talked with the CEO of a top-50 website who is turning on Facebook features next week. He isn’t considering Twitter features. In other words, Facebook’s

So, when Dave Winer says that these companies get press because they went to Davos with me or something like that he is missing the point and judging me improperly. I’ve been pretty right on about these things BECAUSE I listen to developers AFTER the hype storm is over. This is why I follow 18,000+ geeks, VCs, press people, developers, and why I go to lots of events around the world to keep my finger on the real pulse and make sure that my opinions match the truth of what’s happening on the ground.

If Google announces something significant, yes, we’ll cover that too, but I’m getting more and more skeptical about Google’s chances. Here in Israel I heard the words “arrogant” “not innovative” and “incompetent” for the first time applied to Google. That’s a HUGE shift in on-the-ground perceptions for Google and one they should worry about a lot. The opposite words are being applied to Apple and Facebook and Twitter is just seen as “meh” here.

On the other hand, Dave Winer is totally right about what Twitter needs to do to capture the attention of geeks. Open up. Let us build our own Twitters. Let us leave with our data like I could with Wordpress (note that I moved from Wordpress.com to a hosted Wordpress running over on the Rackspace Cloud with not too much trouble — why can’t I do that with Twitter?)

Oh, and Dave is a great friend. We fight like this all the time and generally Dave is right, but here I felt I had to speak up and spank him on the hand for being wrong about why these companies got the press that they do.

Here in Israel I can’t get Pandora. I can’t get Spotify. I can’t get iTunes.

I’m learning about the blacked out world of music where millions, if not billions, of people are not able to buy music because it simply is not available.

What does this cause?

Well, here in Kinneret, Israel, I’m sitting with Ayelet Yagil, who runs the music section of ynet.co.il the news site most popular in Israel with about a million daily readers.

“I want to give my $.99 to the music company but I can’t. There is no legal way for me to get new music. So I go to Soulseek [a file sharing site] and take the song.”

Attempts to do an Israeli version with only Israeli songs failed. “That always fell through because of differences between the record companies,” Yagil says.

The interesting thing is the music industry HAS figured out how to work with mobile carriers in the Middle East and downloading of music onto your mobile phone is huge, but the music labels, Yagil says, can’t get along long enough to figure out a business model to open up to the Web.

So, we all remain in the dark and the music industry leaves hundreds of millions of dollars on the table and forces those in the blacked-out-world of music to steal.

That’s criminal.

I’ve seen a lot of angst over the past week about Facebook’s moves to open up your data to other applications.

To really understand how huge these changes are I had to get away from Silicon Valley and come and hang out with the geeks in Kinneret, Israel where famous VC Yossi Vardi is throwing an exclusive camp for geeks and successful business innovators.

To be sure, there is some fear and even a bit of hatred here of Facebook. Let’s detail that fear and hate:

1. Facebook has broken an invisible privacy contract with its users. Most of the geeks here say they expected Facebook to be about sharing photos, videos, and thoughts with friends and family. But now their previously private data is showing up on Yelp, Pandora, and Spotify. That wasn’t expected by the users, so has generated quite a bit of discussion here.
2. Facebook is very quickly painting the web with little like buttons and other social widgets. One CEO I talked with, who asked me to keep his name and company name out of this article but who runs one of the top 50 websites according to Comscore and Compete.com, told me his company will add Facebook’s likes next week. He’s not the only one saying that. My prediction that 30 of the top 100 Websites would incorporate Facebook’s likes in the first few months might turn out to be very low, based on what I’m hearing in Israel. But that does worry geeks here who are seeing that Facebook is very quickly getting their fingers (and branding) into a very large chunk of the web.
3. I’m sharing a room with one of Yahoo’s search strategists here at Kinnernet and, while he wasn’t able to tell me what direction Yahoo is going in, it’s clear that Facebook has disrupted his thinking of where the world is going. If Yahoo is feeling the disruption imagine what it must be like over at Google! Facebook is studying metadata from all these likes and other behavior of ours and I believe is preparing new kinds of search and discovery services. Facebook doesn’t need to “kill” Google to have quite an effect, either. They just need to put a box around Google which would keep Google from growing. What happens when Google can’t grow the way it wants to? Flat stock prices and loss of ability to hire the best employees that comes with it. Google is the new Microsoft, the geeks here say.
4. The geeks here say that it is clear that Facebook is becoming a dramatically more important, and larger, company than they expected. So, now, new business plans are being changed to account for Facebook’s new power and stance in the world.

So, why is it too late to regulate Facebook?

Well, first of all, what can government do?

1. They can force Facebook to switch its defaults on its new Instant Personalization program, which is already being used by Yelp and Pandora (you can see which music I listen to, for instance, on Pandora, and that feature got turned on automatically. The government could force Facebook to turn that feature off by default and make me “opt in” for you to see my Pandora music.
2. They could fine Facebook for its behavior.
3. They could call Mark Zuckerberg in front of Congress and call him nasty names.

But what else could the government do? I don’t see too many options. Do you?

So, why is it too late to regulate Facebook?

1. The damage is done. Well, let’s assume they made them switch Instant Personalization to opt in. Who cares? The damage is done. My Pandora already has all your music shared with me. Most Facebook members won’t change their privacy settings from what they already are. So, old users will keep sharing their music and only new members will be asked to opt in to these new privacy-sharing features.
2. The regulation will come too slowly. Government never moves fast. Even when it’s motivated. So Zuckerberg has at least a few months to aggregate his power before Government slaps him on the hand. Government is not going to be able to prevent that top 50 website from putting Facebook’s new features into its service. Government will not keep me from using Pandora.
3. The regulation will come after we get used to new privacy landscape. Already I’m finding I’m getting used to the fact that you all can see my data and that I can see yours. So, if Government comes along and tries to regulate that it will get pushback from me. Why? Well, I actually like the new Pandora features. I’m finding a ton of cool music because Zuckerberg forced you to give up some of your privacy. So what that I can see that you like Kenny G? Users will get addicted to these new features and they won’t take kindly to some government jerk taking away these new features.
4. Giving Zuckerberg a fine will not change Facebook’s behavior. If anything it will just push him to monetize these features more aggressively in order to pay the fine. Just wait until Cocacola icons show up next to all those Facebook like buttons. Government taxation, which really is what fines are, might have a negative effect long term.

So, what can be done about Facebook? I don’t see what we can do about Facebook. Not enough people have changed their behaviors due to these changes. I’m watching and these features are VERY popular. Even here in Israel, far from the hype bubble of Silicon Valley, all the geeks I talked with are impressed with the new features and many are already implementing them. No one sees Facebook as less powerful or less interesting today than two weeks ago. Even with a few of my geeky friends saying they deleted their accounts from Facebook my feed there is actually moving faster lately and my items are getting more engagement, which shows that not many geeks changed their behavior away from Facebook.

Zuckerberg just played chicken with our privacy and it sure looks like he won based on what I’m hearing here in Israel.

What do you think?